On the Role of Expectations in Experiences of Alienation

Experiences of alienation come in a remarkable variety, but they share at least two first-personal features in common, namely, the feelings (1) that I am, to some degree, not the subject of my experience and (2) that my experience does not fully belong to me. In a word, in an experience of alienation, I feel, to some extent, like I am not myself and my experience is not mine. This article explores the hypothesis that such experiences result from a profound mismatch between our anticipatory expectations about what our experience will be like and the way our experience in fact unfolds. The analysis I offer is phenomenological—it’s a study of how we constitute (or make sense of) these experiences as experiences of alienation. My method is also contrastive—I begin by characterizing a default condition in which I feel like I am myself and my experiences are mine, and I then use that default condition as a point of contrast to study alienation. After I sketch a phenomenology of alienation, I then show how my view might be drawn on to supplement accounts of alienation in some recent prominent work in the phenomenology of illness, grief, and mental disorder.